Developing Laravel Packages with Local Composer Dependencies

Developing Composer packages locally through a local file symlink speeds up development immensely when you want to create Laravel packages and try them out on a real application. I was reading about a fancy bash alias by Caleb Porzio, which is a bash alias inspired by npm link.

I have been working on improving my local workflow for taking a Laravel package from development to release, and I often find myself installing my dependency through the GitHub repo, and then continue running composer update over and over as I update things because I am lazy.

I thought I’d document my workflow for developing new and existing Laravel packages and running them in a real Laravel application, all locally.

Package Setup

I am going to walk you through creating a quick Composer package from scratch and adding a service provider. I know a couple of package developers that use a boilerplate repository as a starting point for PHP and Laravel packages (see Spatie’s PHP Skeleton for inspiration).

First, let’s create an example composer project and hook up a Laravel service provider. I like to start my code from ~/code so update to whatever you use: